According to Le Thi Hoang Thanh, Deputy Director General of the Department of Civil and Economic Laws under the Ministry of Justice, the draft amended Housing Law is being developed towards creating a more transparent and stable legal framework, reducing compliance costs, reforming administrative procedures, promoting decentralisation and delegation of powers, and removing bottlenecks in housing investment and development.
The draft also aims to diversify housing types, encourage the development of rental housing and affordable commercial housing, and improve regulations on ownership, transactions, and financial policies in the housing sector.
“These policies directly affect investment and business activities of enterprises, project developers, credit institutions, consultancy, notary, and brokerage organisations, as well as household businesses in the construction, materials, and property sectors,” Thanh stressed.
Arranging electric vehicle parking areas in apartment buildings in accordance with construction regulations
According to the Deputy Director General of the Department of Civil and Economic Laws under the Ministry of Justice, regarding apartment buildings, the draft law revises and supplements regulations on resettlement, compensation, and support in line with the two-tier local administration model and administrative boundary arrangements; clarifies incentive mechanisms for commercially operated areas within projects to ensure a legal basis for implementation; and allows provincial-level People's Committees to decide on adjustments to economic-technical indicators, land-use functions, and land-use indicators under construction planning in areas implementing apartment building renovation and reconstruction projects that differ from construction planning technical regulations.
The draft also stipulates that areas for electric vehicle parking, charging, and battery swapping in apartment buildings must be arranged in accordance with construction regulations, and clarifies the determination of ownership and use rights over car parking spaces in apartment buildings.
According to lecturer Nguyen Tan Hoang Hai of the Faculty of Civil Law at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Law, compared with the 2023 Housing Law, the draft amended Housing Law changes its approach to developers’ rights over parking spaces from “management rights” to “ownership rights”, including possession, use, and disposition. This provision addresses the exercise of developers’ rights over parking spaces compared with the 2014 and 2023 Housing Laws. However, viewed from the draft as a whole, there are still inconsistencies that could make implementation difficult in practice.
The draft stipulates that if a car parking space is neither purchased nor leased, it shall belong to the developer of the housing construction investment project, regardless of whether it is within or outside the prescribed standards. However, it also stipulates that the standard parking area must first be reserved for apartment owners, while only the area “outside the prescribed standards” may be “owned and commercially operated according to demand” by the developer.
This raises the question of whether the standard area becomes the developer’s property when residents do not purchase or lease it, whether the developer may exercise ownership rights over this area, or whether it may commercially operate it according to demand. Such provisions could lead to different interpretations.
Regarding the enforcement mechanism for the handover of apartment building maintenance funds, Hoang Hai said the current draft only stipulates that if a developer fails to hand over maintenance funds, the apartment building management board “shall submit a written request to the commune-level People's Committee to require the developer to hand over the maintenance funds”. The Government will provide detailed guidance.
Thus, enforcement of the handover of maintenance funds under the draft stops at ordinary administrative procedures and does not establish any specific enforcement measures, such as freezing accounts, transferring funds without the developer’s consent, or seizing assets.
Meanwhile, the mechanism for enforcing the handover of maintenance funds under the 2023 Housing Law and Decree No. 95/2024/ND-CP dated July 24, 2024 established a phased enforcement mechanism and has demonstrated practical effectiveness in dealing with developers who delay the handover of maintenance funds.
The draft’s removal of almost all provisions on enforcement of the handover of maintenance funds and its assignment of the matter to the Government for regulation is inappropriate, as asset enforcement measures should have a legal basis at the law level rather than being regulated entirely by subordinate legal documents. Therefore, Hoang Hai proposed adding to Article 129 a principle of enforcement that retains and builds on the provisions of the 2023 Housing Law.
Ensuring the highest level of safety for housing transactions
The draft amendment basically retains Article 164 of the 2023 Housing Law regarding notarisation. Specifically, housing transactions requiring notarisation or certification include sale, hire-purchase, gifting, exchange, capital contribution, and mortgage of housing.
Transactions not requiring notarisation or certification include the gifting of houses of gratitude, houses of compassion, and houses of great solidarity by organisations; the sale or hire-purchase of public housing; the sale or hire-purchase of housing where one party is an organisation, including social housing, housing for the people's armed forces, and resettlement housing; capital contribution with housing where one party is an organisation; and the rental, lending, staying in, or authorisation for management of housing. The parties may still request notarisation if they deem it necessary.
The Ho Chi Minh City Notaries Association said that removing the mandatory notarisation requirement could bring clear benefits, including reducing time and direct costs; avoiding repeated checks of matters already verified by State agencies; facilitating the conclusion of electronic contracts; and respecting the parties’ freedom of choice.
However, these benefits can only be achieved if the transaction chain still ensures verification, execution, and registration. If a signed document cannot be verified, is not updated promptly, or requires multiple additional confirmations later, costs reduced at the initial stage may simply become verification, document correction, or dispute-resolution costs at a later stage.
The assessment criterion, therefore, should not be “whether notarisation is required”, but the total cost and level of certainty throughout the transaction lifecycle, from contract conclusion, payment, and handover to issuance of certificates, secondary transactions, and registration of changes. Retaining existing regulations provides stability; however, the regulatory context has changed.
The draft currently expands or clarifies the participation of enterprises, cooperatives, cooperative unions, and foreign-invested economic organisations in developing certain types of policy-oriented housing, while promoting electronic contracts and data systems and redefining the scope between housing law and real estate business law.
Therefore, according to the association, existing regulations should be reassessed not because the scope of notarial activities needs to be expanded, but because alternative mechanisms need to be compatible with the new transaction structure. In principle, procedures should not be retained simply because they already exist, nor should a procedure be removed merely to reduce the number of procedures.
Removing mandatory notarisation is reasonable when a transaction carries low risks or its risks are controlled through other mechanisms that can operate effectively, are supported by data, and have clearly responsible parties.
For high-risk transactions, sufficiently robust safeguards are needed to ensure the safety of all parties, particularly given the significant transaction values of land and housing. The responsibilities of all parties for the accuracy of project information, contracts, and transaction status must be clearly established.
